Marking Time (66 page)

The Duchy shot her a sharp look and was not in the least deceived.

‘My lamb, we shall be at least seventeen for dinner that night, eighteen if your father comes and that would mean three geese. Mrs Cripps couldn’t get them all in the oven –
even supposing we could get them in the first place.’

‘Pheasants, then?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Well, not rabbit,’ she said.

‘That will be for lunch on Sunday. Mrs Cripps makes very good pies, you know that.’

‘Do you think she would like me to help her at all? After all, I can cook a bit.’

The Duchy was clearly pleased. ‘I think that might be a very good plan. But you will have to do exactly as she says. It is her kitchen.’

‘I promise I will.’

‘I’ll speak to her this morning and see what she says. You may just have to be a kitchenmaid, you know. Is that understood?’

Louise took some of her worries to Archie, who listened, as he always did, with imperturbable gravity until she had finished. ‘Well, darling Louise, I take your point, but I
shouldn’t worry
too
much. If I were Michael, I’d be far keener on seeing you and your exceptionally nice family than the sofa covers. Which, anyway,’ he added, ‘are
rather nice. I only like things if they look used.’

This point of view hadn’t occurred to her, but because it was presented by Archie, it made her feel much better.

Villy, too, was in a state of high tension about the weekend. It was something she had wanted for so long, it had been put off so often, that even now, on Saturday morning, she
felt that something might go wrong at the last minute. And when she wasn’t worrying about that, she was feeling anxious about it happening. Meeting Lorenzo with his wife – and possibly
with Edward there as well – he still wasn’t sure whether he could get away, although she didn’t know quite
why
he couldn’t know – was going to be a peculiar
strain. The chances of being alone with Lorenzo for a minute were remote, and even if they occurred, the likelihood of interruption was so great, that nothing could be said. She had managed to
telephone Jessica to say how sorry she was that they would not be able to have her that weekend but, to her surprise, Jessica had said that she would not have been able to come anyway. She expected
Raymond up for a weekend’s leave from Woodstock, and she knew the house was very full, so both of them coming was out of the question.

Villy, immensely relieved, said, ‘I’ll give him your love, shall
I
?’

‘Who?’

‘Lorenzo.’

‘Oh. Yes, do do that.’ She seemed about to laugh. ‘But not Mercedes, I think,’ she said.

Saturday morning was turmoil. Clary and Polly spent it moving themselves to the squash court. The maids made up the beds for the visitors, did all the bedrooms, lit Mr
Archie’s fire, washed the extra china and glass needed and were hardly through before dinner time – twelve thirty – in the kitchen. There, Mrs Cripps had made four pounds of
pastry, plucked and drawn four pheasants, made two rice puddings and three fish pies for lunch that day, and a huge pan of bubble and squeak for the kitchen dinner, jointed, floured and fried five
rabbits for the Sunday pies, made two pints of onion sauce and two pints of bread sauce – she allowed Louise to help with these. Edie scraped fifteen pounds of potatoes, cleaned five pounds
of leeks, and five pounds of Brussels sprouts, scraped three pounds of carrots, washed up breakfast, middle mornings and laid the table for kitchen dinner. Ellen, in the smaller children’s
night nursery, ironed the clothes of Wills, Roly, Neville and Lydia – she missed the baby very much, but it was a blessing not to have all those nappies to air. Christopher took Neville and
Lydia to the spring to fill up three dozen bottles with drinking water which then had to be put in a wheelbarrow and taken back in batches. They soon got bored, and played with Oliver. ‘He
has turned into a very nice dog,’ Lydia said approvingly. ‘Aunt Rachel said that people got to look just like whatever dog they had.’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Neville said. ‘She said dogs got to look like their person.’

‘That’s a very boring way round.’ She stroked Oliver’s black and white forehead and touched his grape-coloured nose. ‘It would be much more interesting if
Christopher had topaz eyes and a black nose.’

‘She meant it in a manner of speaking,’ Neville said loftily.

‘When people say that they just mean that it isn’t what they meant.’

‘Come on, you two. It’s your turn to fill some bottles. My hands are freezing. Stop quarrelling and help.’

‘We weren’t quarrelling. We weren’t
quarrelling.’
Neville was outraged. ‘We were simply talking about a subject.’

Villy went to Battle and did an enormous shop for the household, and also collected prescriptions from the nursing home, had them made up and returned them. She collected their
quota of paraffin for the cottage and the Brig’s study, and paid the monthly accounts at the garage, grocer and Till’s, called on the piano tuner, who had missed his last appointment,
and then returned to mend the carpet sweeper, a fuse in the cottage – poor Miss Milliment had spent the previous evening with no light – and finally braved the stables to put new
batteries into the wireless Wren had been given by the family last Christmas. He had received it without expression, but he played it all of every day when he was not asleep or at the pub.
He
had started the morning by sawing wood as he had been told to do by McAlpine, but he soon got tired of it and set about repainting the stable door. But as he couldn’t be bothered
with sanding down or with undercoats and was simply slopping another coat of gloss on top of the old one, it was rather a mess and he was just deciding to give it up when Villy appeared. He was
incapable of putting in the new batteries himself. His skills with horses – no longer wanted – had once made him a cocky, belligerent little man; now he had retreated into a sullen
ineptitude. He still retained respect for Mrs Edward, though; she never forgot him, unlike some – ‘some’ being everybody excepting the Brig who, on red-letter days, he took riding
on a leading rein since the poor gent had lost his sight. He was kept going by his burning hatred for motor cars and the Germans, and his salary, which he drank. Mrs Edward, having made the
contraption work again, offered him a cigarette. He took it, touched the side of his forehead like a nervous tic and put the cigarette carefully in his waistcoat pocket. He would have it with his
dinner, he said. He did not eat at the house. Edie put a covered plate outside the stable door every day; it was usually stone cold by the time he fancied it.

Such a sad little man, Villy thought as she walked away.

She didn’t ought to wear trousers, he thought watching her across the courtyard. He never wore them himself, and despised anyone who did, although he had had to admit that when Mrs Edward
took to riding astride, he’d had less trouble with saddle sores. Still, breeches were one thing, trousers were quite another.

In another five and a half hours he will be here! Villy thought as she ran upstairs to wash for lunch.

Sybil spent the morning playing with Wills and Roly, who were beginning to play with each other. This cut both ways: they took toys from each other and there was spasmodic rage
and grief. ‘You can’t have that – it’s too
important
for you,’ Wills said once, wresting a red-painted engine from his cousin. Roly did not fight back; he
simply wept and nothing would please him until suddenly something else did. In the afternoon they would have rests, and then Ellen would take them for a walk. Sybil would have a delicious sleep and
then it would be tea-time and then Hugh would come. There were all those other people as well, but it was Hugh who would make her day. She smiled as the thought occurred to her that she was looking
forward to his coming – and they had been married now for nearly twenty-one years – quite as much as Louise could be looking forward to her Michael.

Dolly spent the morning trying to find her bottle-green cardigan, the one Flo had made her – it must be ten years ago. It was only after she had been through all the shelves and drawers
twice that she remembered that Ellen had taken it away to wash. She also wrote a letter thanking somebody she hardly knew from Stanmore who had seen about poor Flo in
The Times
and written
a very nice letter. ‘She will be greatly missed,’ she wrote back in her large, spidery hand. A few sentences took up all the paper. Their house at Stanmore had been shut up for a long
time. I suppose I shall never go home, now, she thought. But then she would not wish to do so alone – without Flo. She did not want to do anything without her, but now she had to do
everything. She had been such wonderful company. Dolly often found herself having conversations with Flo who, no longer there with her own opinions, now agreed with everything Dolly said, but
somehow this made the conversations shorter, and not so interesting. She did try once or twice disagreeing with herself, but she never felt she quite caught the
flavour
of Flo’s
mind. She had been taught from a young girl to bear adversity, and she did not complain or mourn openly to anyone, but this simply left her with little or often nothing to say. The Duchy had kindly
suggested that she might like to change her bedroom after Flo died, but no, she would never do that. The room was where she could best remember her – except, of course, at dear Stanmore where
they had lived all their lives, with both, and then one parent, and finally by themselves. She thought sometimes now that they had lived all their lives on the sidelines, as it were, in the
slipstream of other people’s events. Being bridesmaids at Kitty’s wedding, rejoicing in the schoolroom that Papa had been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, comforting their mother
when their younger brother Humphrey had been killed in the war, nursing their mother, comforting their father, and finally nursing him . . . there seemed to have been nothing direct, no
circumstance entirely belonging to them. And now she was left, and so fortunate that Kitty had married well and could take her in. But if there hadn’t been a war, she thought with sudden
fear, I should have been at Stanmore and I should have been entirely alone with only Mrs Marcus coming three times a week and Trevelyan mowing the lawns on Saturdays. It was Flo who had been so
good at opening tins; modern food had been a blessing although not always easy to digest . . .